Posts Tagged: Trump

There have been calls to ease off on “hating Trump”, suggesting a large part of the country is fairly wallowing in it, and hinting it’s not appropriate…

Listen. If a traitor takes over the country you live in, destroys its environmental protections at every possible juncture, takes directions from a cryptofascist kleptocrat running a regime pretending to be democratic when it isn’t, imperils the world by undermining nuclear weapons control treaties (both with Iran and Russia), spreads hate for people of color, empowers racist extremists, hires people that try to give away national parks to mining and oil corporations, weakens regulations that keep us from getting bacteria in our food, hires a woman who tries to destroy public schools in favor of Christian theocracy…I could go on and on…if that’s the guy…and it is…despising him is appropriate. Hate is useless burning of good energy. Despising what is vile…that’s perfectly natural.

Does it sound treasonous? That I think it may be necessary for the EU and Canada and Australia and Mexico, say, to levy sanctions against the USA because of Trump’s policies? Financial sanctions will hurt us all, me too. Prices will go up, our economy may founder. His dropping out of the Paris Climate Agreement, his trashing the agreement with Iran, which puts our allies in danger, his plan to drop the Nuclear treaty, his failure to support NATO, his willingness to kowtow to Russia’s needs–all of that puts our allies at risk.

If financial pressure is put on the Trump administration, he may well be forced to back off. One thing Trump understands…is losing money. The financial fallout for America might well make even more Americans feel that the Trump era needs to be over with. Some, of course, will only dig in their heels. But when bankers and oil companies start to lose money, pressure is brought to bear. And Trump could be forced by the big money people to moderate, to backtrack on some things, even to resign.

Is it treasonous for me to take that tack? I’m loyal to the USA. But I’m also loyal to the planet Earth. I think that if Trump is thwarted, this way, then both the USA and the Earth end up winning.

Trump and his endless rallies. How much time does each one take? Who pays for it? How expensive is it? He seems to do them in clusters when he’s under pressure.

My main question is, how much Presidential work time is Trump squandering with the trips to the rallies, the playing out of the rallies themselves–and then the trips from the rallies? I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s asked this. But why isn’t he challenged on this issue by Congressional Democrats? Or the GAO, say? Even if the costs of rally spaces and lighting and bunting and staff and enthusiastic clappers are covered privately by supporters somehow, his transportation and protection is all on the taxpayer’s dime. And the *time* Trump wastes on these incoherent amplifications of his engorged vanity has monetary value to taxpayers as well.

All Presidents travel about, meet people, give speeches from time to time, but this stadium sized national embarrassment is beyond the pale. I say we send Trump an invoice.

This CNN headline, with which a commentator asks “How stupid does Trump think we are?”, just makes me writhe with the painful irony of it all. Lady, we as a nation, the Great Averaging of the body politic, are fucking stupid. That much is stupid, or we wouldn’t have got into this ludicrous fix in the first place. This was National Stupidity. I include in that people who voted for Jill Stein, people who chose not to support Hillary Clinton–who chose not to vote, endorse and defend her; who bought into the wildly negative often Russian-sponsored propaganda against her. She’s no Obama and she’s no Lincoln and she’s no FDR but she’d have done a decent job and because we didn’t vote for her we now have a national calamity.

I also blame the Bernie Bros (as opposed to sane Bernie supporters, who voted for Clinton after she got the nomination) and especially the “it doesn’t matter who you vote for they’re all alike” chumps, and the voters who just couldn’t be bothered to show up at the polls. I very much include people who choose glibness over nuance and the supposed perfect over the doable. Now look where we are! And Congress, so long as it’s controlled by the GOP, will do NOTHING about our national calamity because *he signs the bills they give him*.

I predict that Kavanaugh, despite any delays, will be confirmed Supreme Court Justice because the votes are not there to stop it. I predict that Brian Benczkowski will be confirmed as number 3 man at Justice Department–he is a Trump operative who helped set up deals with the Russians during campaign–and he will be appointed to take Rosenstein’s place and he will end Mueller’s investigation of Trump and his confederates. Thus there will be no getting rid of Trump till 2020.

I predict that every effort to suppress votes against Trump in the Presidential election will be made, that the Russians will try to use hacking to remove people from voter roles, that there will be a probability of Trump being re-elected UNLESS we organize to register and motivate more people who’ll vote against Trump–FAR more than ever–to vote in November and in 2020, so that the vote against him is overwhelming despite efforts to stop it.

“Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, according to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, Israeli intelligence officials gathered at CIA headquarters, where they were told something astonishing: Russia, the agency believed, had “leverages of pressure” over the incoming president. Therefore, the agency advised the Israelis to consider the possibility that Trump might pass their secrets on to Russia. The Israelis dismissed the warning as outlandish. Who could believe that the world’s most powerful country was about to hand its presidency to a Russian dupe? That the United States government had, essentially, fallen?” Please read this article at New York Magazine: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-putin-russia-collusion.html

It’s been obvious to many of us that in time Trump will bring violent death down upon America *from within*. A scaled down Civil War is not impossible–at any rate, people are likely to be killed, quite a few people. We noted the foreshadowing of the coming conflict at his campaign rallies where he gleefully incited violence. There are already warnings from right-wing radicals that if there’s an effort to impeach him, liberals will be attacked.

Now Trump is harping on the fantasy that the FBI was used by the (quite unreal) “Deep State” to spy on him. “Spygate” he calls it. This and his other efforts to characterize the Justice Dept as an enemy of his administration –thus, an enemy of the people–creates the illusion, in the minds of his followers, of “America under siege”. A respected arm of government is smeared, and is seen by more and more people as as besieging “real Americans”. Delusional wingnut views of government that used to be in malodorous little pockets are now widely shared–a situation that cries out for violent resistance in the minds of more and more Trump devotees.

Trump’s demagoguery is disseminating anti-government conspiracy theories more widely; they’re cultivated in this atmosphere, they’re given a veneer of respectability and a pseudo validity, and will spread out of their wingnut hothouse and across the land. Combine this with his allying, quite recently and baldly, with the NRA, bringing the popular misreading of Second Amendment to the fore.

Encouraged by the mainstreaming of their shared delusion, his minions will rev up their hulking four by four trucks and load them with weapons; they will, in their fantasy of butthurt “patriotism”, collect explosives and ready them. They will resurrect the memory of Timothy McVeigh and they will whitewash and canonize him and seek to do what he did. Small and large acts of violence will become the norm in “the defense of the second amendment and the President”. This nation is a tinderbox–Trump is becoming a social arsonist.

I doubt Mueller will have provable charges against Trump unless he can show Trump was DIRECTLY involved in money laundering at his hotels. Sure, that crime went on–but prove he knew of it (yes, he did, but prove it). The collusion thing–yes it happened but hard to prove legally, in Trump’s case. He can claim he didn’t know his staff was doing it…the obstruction of Justice is real but too legally ambiguous in his case…I agree with Bill Maher that Trump will not leave office no matter how he’s pressured–he will just dig in his heels and say no.

There are too many people making out like bandits, looting the country under his administration, banking concerns, and so on, and those people push the buttons on Congressmen. So he’ll never be impeached through Congress. However–if Dems take control of congress after November…then maybe….

I believe it’s likely he can only be removed through voting him out in 2020. And the problem with that, at least now, is more people are giving him their approval because they got a small break on their taxes after the tax reform (I know, it’s only temporary). And Trump got lucky on North Korea…so far. The economy is strong in some ways–especially if you’re a person with money to invest. …so Dems will have to work hard to unseat Trump in 2020. You’d think it would be a no brainer, but too many Americans JUST DO NOT CARE that he’s paying off porn stars, that he’s treated women like dirt, that there is corruption swirling around his administration. They only care that they got their small tax break.

I believe that Trump is a criminal who has engaged in money laundering and who is using his office to promote his private business interests; is a serial harasser of women, may have committed rape…Has likely committed treason…Deserves to be in jail…is doing vast damage to the USA and the world through his vindictive deregulation and his idiotic posturing and his “decisions” on Iran and the Paris Climate Accords… But I think it’ll be hard to pry him from office before 2020.

Not a terribly big asteroid. But one enough to punch a great hole in the heart of America. Its impact on the USA is just the beginning–the shockwaves spread out from there…In the case of the asteroid the explosion rains particles of Earth and asteroid, darkening great parts of the world… That’s what comes to my mind, when I think about TRUMP. It’s not the end of the world or, technically, the end of the United States. It’s the maiming of America; it’s the crippling, of America… When I think about Scott Pruitt, like all that darkening debris, all that toxic dust from the asteroid…When I think about the tax plan. Great numbers of people dying in the cold darkness. The sudden impact, then the slow progress of America’s black lung disease… I want to think about something else.

They actually know what it’s really about. Trump’s claim that taking down Confederate statues foolishly “rips apart” history is a lot like responding to Black Lives Matter by saying, “Oh and white lives don’t?” Most of the “Oh, White Lives don’t?” people know that’s not what is meant by Black Lives Matter. They know perfectly well it’s a slogan meant to remind us that there is racist invalidation of the value of black lives, as demonstrated by biased police violence.

And Trump knows, as the KKK knows, that the statues are being taken down because the Confederacy was created in an effort to sustain slavery. Other causes of the Civil War were secondary. It truly was about slavery. Which is in turn about racism; about the claim that blacks have a status that is less than human. Wartime heroics is cover–that’s not what is being remembered here. It was treason and an insistence on slavery. They know that. Even Trump knows that. Liars know they’re lying.